One of the hallmarks of the Age of Fear in which we live is that everywhere we turn there are not only new threats, but with the arrival of each one there is also a vast orchestra of technologies available to make it roar and rumble and make us tremble. The threats are so myriad and the cacophony of alarms and ominous analyses so loud that it becomes impossible to discern which threats should really concern us and which are less important. Minor risks rise up on the waves of our other worries until they appear just as big as some threats many times their size.

Recently, we watched as Ebola stormed into our consciousness because of one particularly unfortunate case and fatality in the United States. This is not to minimize the scale of the threat in the few West African countries in which the outbreak is primarily contained — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. But in the United States, the threat was minimal, yet the threat amplifiers on the sound system of the country’s national consciousness (talk radio, cable news, social media) were all turned up, “This Is Spinal Tap”-style, to 11.

The Islamic State (IS) is another recent threat that has rocked our world — a threat so great that one acronym hasn’t been enough to describe it. A mobile, well-resourced, social-media-savvy hybrid terrorist group that is part insurgency and part blitzkrieging desert army, it warrants much of the unease it has triggered. As a modern terrorist group, however, it has been adept at using 21st century media to put fear in the hearts of observers everywhere, whether by videotaping beheadings, tweeting out victories and taunts, or conducting a massive recruitment operation complete with slick digital magazines and online annual reports to make the group appear dangerous and entrepreneurial at the same time.

Put threat in perspective

But the Islamic State is also an example of a threat that, if not overstated, has been largely misconstrued. It is, after all, only an organization of perhaps 20,000 to 35,000 fighters. It has very limited resources. Its hold on the cities it has claimed is tenuous and to a large degree desperate, depending more on threats than on the active support of the majority of local populations. It is not a major threat to the residents of the United States and certainly not anything like the existential threats Americans faced in the last century.

We, however, have applied the transitive property of terrorism to elevate its status: We have come to see the Islamic State as the new al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda, despite being a relatively small organization with limited capabilities, had previously been elevated to the role of America’s new Enemy No. 1, occupying a position once held by a real existential threat, the Soviet Union, which had inherited its root-of-all-evil mantle from the Nazis.

Is the Islamic State a real threat? Yes, of course, a serious one. But it’s not as much of a threat at least for now to Americans and their way of life as it is to American interests and America’s allies in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But there are other threats beyond those that dominate the nightly news or are seemingly permanently plastered on your Facebook wall.

These include those associated with gradually rising powers such as China that gain influence and then exert influence subtly. Or those associated with climate change and the potentially huge upheavals that shifting weather patterns may cause in coastal societies and to global food supplies, water resources, and other vital underpinnings of life on the planet. Or those associated with another global economic crunch or the growing risk of cyberconflicts.

But beyond these international risks, there are risks closer to home for Americans, profound threats that are plain to see and, to my mind, are ignored to a remarkable, almost unfathomable degree.

These are urgent challenges that do not involve armies or terrorists but touch every one on either side of Main Street. Indeed, whatever we may say right now based on today’s headlines, it is these issues that will be absolutely central to the 2016 U.S. presidential race. They are the sticking points of the new American economy, the disturbing realities that have made the recent economic recovery unlike any other.

They have to do with the fact that despite steady job growth rivaling the gains of the Clinton years, and despite a booming stock market and a rising GDP outstripping those of the world’s other major developed economies, wages are not rising and the quality of the jobs being created is disturbingly low. We are, in fact, seeing America’s first major post-recession recovery that has bypassed its middle class.

Ninety percent of the gains have gone to the top 10 percent of the population. Something is broken. Something is badly wrong.

The American dream

The most grotesque element of this threat to the American dream, to America’s sense of itself and to its fundamental social cohesion, is growing inequality. In fact, it is inequality at historic levels. As reported in the most recent issue of the Economist, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America’s population is about to achieve a level of wealth equivalent to that of the bottom 90 percent. That’s just over 300,000 people with holdings equal to that of some 280 million. Those wealthy few will control 22 percent of the wealth. The bottom 90 percent, everybody essentially, will also have 22 percent. This in turn means that the top 10 percent of the U.S. population will control 78 percent of America’s wealth. Almost eight out of every 10 dollars of net worth.

This is a harbinger. Given this greatest of threats to average Americans — the threat that there is no better future out there for them and their children and that they will toil away producing profits to be enjoyed only by a privileged handful of Americans — we can count on the political debate in the United States for the next two years to turn less and less on the Islamic State or Ebola and more and more on the time bomb placed at the foundations of the U.S. economy, an economic engine of division and destruction that is gradually pulling the country apart and instilling anger and frustration in many of its citizens.

David Rothkopf is CEO and editor of the FP Group. His book, “National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear,” was released on Oct. 28.

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